How Power BI Embedded Helps MB3M Provide A More Dynamic Reporting Solution To Its Customers

MB3M is a French software company founded in 2007 that builds applications for travel agencies. Its flagship product, MB3M Travel, covers a vast array of CRM, financial, and accounting needs of travel agencies. Travel managers use it to analyze travel expenses and respond to their customer needs.

Challenge

In MB3M Travel’s original design, travel managers would receive PDF and Excel reports by email or through a portal. With the digital transformation that is being brought about in every industry and the pace at which travel agencies are requesting analytics, the manually created PDF and Excel reports are not keeping up with the speed of business. MB3M was spending valuable company resources to build these analytical reports, yet there was a consistent backlog of requests for more reports. In essence, travel managers were asking for something more dynamic that could help them get their questions answered on the fly and MB3M was not equipped to satisfy that demand at scale.

Goal & Solution

MB3M was looking to upgrade their reporting capabilities, fully mindful of the goal that the reports should be embedded in the application and customizable, self-service capable, secured, and fully integrated into their platform. Last but not least, developers should be empowered to create interactive reports with rich visuals easy to consume for the end-user.

MB3M found its solution in Microsoft Power BI Embedded. Power BI Embedded, along with the Power BI Desktop tool, provided MB3M with an all-in-one Business Intelligence platform that satisfied its data preparation, data analytics, and data visualization requirements. Additionally, the custom visuals library provided MB3M with a collection of visualizations that helped them best explain their customers the insights within their data. By making use of the Row Level Security feature, MB3M made custom roles based on needs, ensuring that the user was only allowed to perform the specific role they had been assigned. The analytical capabilities were integrated into the web application using the Power BI JavaScript SDK, ensuring that the end-user experience was seamless and that they could visualize and analyze data in one place, simply and intuitively.

Now, when travel managers use the MB3M travel product, they are able to turn insights into action. The ability to deliver a scalable and cost-effective solution that has the power to provide contextual insights and enhance the customer experience has made Power BI Embedded the right solution for MB3M.

With Power BI Embedded, MB3M is able to maintain consistency in the look and feel of the application after adding analytics inside it. Travel managers will require little training to build a self-service report and get insights that matter to them the most. For instance, in the example below, a travel manager can review a preview of the table board specific to his business using various types of data visualizations. The user can perform a slice-and-dice analysis on the data, including the ability to drill filter subsets of the data in or out of analysis.

See the technical case study on GitHub for a detailed study on the architecture used, the row level security implementation, publish of report, and integration of report into the app.